Saturday, November 21, 2015

The Giant Mechanical Man (2012, PG-13)

This movie has been on my radar for a while – I’m usually up for an offbeat, indie rom-com, the cast is excellent, and the premise hooked me right away.  Having finally got around to seeing it, however, I’m sorry to report that it’s not all I wanted it to be.  Despite a lot of promise and some terrific performances, the story isn’t strong enough to make it as great as it could have been.

Janice and Tim are both searching for direction in their lives.  Janice just lost her job and her apartment.  She needs time to figure out what she wants, but she doesn’t have any space to do so; after moving in with her sister, Janice is constantly bombarded with well-meaning advice, hints, and pushes.  Meanwhile, Tim, a living-statue street artist, is beginning to lose faith in his choices.  His girlfriend is fed up with his “dead-end” artistic pursuits and has thrown him over, making Tim wonder if there’s truly any worth to what he does.  A bit of serendipity puts Tim and Janice in one another’s paths, and, amidst plenty of complications and interference, each slowly recognizes the other as a fellow “lost person” trying to do their best in an alienating era.

I love buskers, and I adore living statues.  The idea of a film about someone who spends his days as a living statue was instantly intriguing to me.  I’ll stop to watch a street artist like that for a minute or two, but they do this for hours on end.  They dress/paint themselves up every morning to go out and do it.  And then, even more significantly, they go home at the end of the day.  They have friends, significant others, homes, appetites, social engagements.  What does the everyday-commonplace stuff look like in the life of a person who does something so singular?  You didn’t have to tell me twice – I was all about seeing this movie.

Unfortunately, the films feels really overwritten to me, belaboring its incredibly-valid points – about life, ambition, and admitting one doesn’t have all the answers – by beating them into the ground.  Here, Tim and Janice are completely and utterly the odd ones out, the nails that haven’t been hammered down, but the ordinary, “have it all figured out” characters are so over-the-top in their smugness, blandness, and/or obnoxiousness that much of the tension is excised from the story.  It’s hard to get angry on Janice’s behalf when her sister walks all over her, or Tim’s when a gaggle of corporate types look down their noses at him, because the sister, the corporate types, and so many other minor and supporting characters are just too exaggerated to be believable.  Topher Grace’s Doug, a douchey self-help author and set-up date for Janice, gets a bit of a pass just because Grace commits so fully that the character feels more intentionally satirical.

Where the film works, however, is with Janice and Tim themselves.  The writing can still misfire at times, but the burgeoning connection between these two is much more solidly built, and Jenna Fischer and Chris Messina (Danny from The Mindy Project, which is how I first heard about the movie) both sell the heck out of their characters.  Every moment in which the film really, honestly succeeds involves them together; the chemistry between them is lovely and understated, and their bond feels important, vital to both characters’ journey to figure themselves out.  Both actors are so great that I’m annoyed the movie doesn’t match their wonderful work in it.

Warnings

Language, mild sexual content, and drinking.

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